CUE HEALTH AWARDED $481M TO MAKE RAPID COVID-19 TEST
S.D. biotech to use DOD funds to produce 6M tests by March 2021
San Diego biotech Cue Health announced this week that it has received $481 million from the Department of Defense to produce 6 million fast, portable COVID-19 tests by March 2021.
Cue will scale up to producing 100,000 tests a day at the biotech’s San Diego facilities. The company plans to deploy the tests in nursing homes, health clinics and other settings where patients receive medical care.
Getting a quick test result is key in these settings. And Cue’s test, small enough to fit in the palm of your hand, returns results within around 20 minutes.
To perform a test, a user inserts a nasal swab into a cartridge, which connects to a test reader that detects genetic mate
rial from the coronavirus. Each cartridge is good for one test, but the reader can be used repeatedly. The reader costs a few hundred dollars, and the cartridge’s cost is in the tens of dollars, ac
cording to remarks by Cue CEO Ayub Khattak in a June interview with CNBC.
“Our vision in designing the Cue Health Monitoring System
was to enable individuals to have more control over their health and lives by providing access to actionable, accurate health data in real time,” said Khattak in a statement. “The U.S. government’s support has and will allow us to fulfill this vision in this particularly critical moment.”
In June, the Food and Drug Administration issued an emergency use authorization for the test to be used to detect the coronavirus in people suspected to have COVID-19. When the test was run on 60 samples known to have the coronavirus and 16 known negative samples, it returned accurate results 100 percent of the time. Other companies with emergency authorized COVID-19 tests have reported data from similar sample sizes. Typically, validating a diagnostic test takes several months and hundreds (sometimes thousands) of samples, but the FDA has relaxed that standard to quickly roll out tests during the pandemic.
Cue has said that Mayo Clinic is running a study to evaluate the accuracy of its test and has shared preliminary results with the Department of Health and Human Services. The full report has not yet been released.